Post Script
by Red River
Summary: Bobby thought he'd prepared himself for almost anything when those boys moved into his house and Sam stopped sleeping alone in the room at the end of the hall. But somehow he isn't prepared for this: Sam dancing with an angel in his living room. Part of the Other Guardian 'verse; a short interlude post-Resolution. Castiel/Sam.


A/N: This is another story in a mild AU/canon divergence series called The Other Guardian 'verse. There is a more detailed note about it on my profile, but in brief: after Dean is raised from Hell by Castiel, an entire year passes before the Lilith rises and the seals start to break. During that time, Castiel is assigned to watch over the Winchesters, and finds himself growing closer and closer to Sam.

This story follows "Resolution," but not closely - unlike the other stories in this 'verse, this one is just an interlude, intended to take place sometime down the road for Cas and Sam, possibly after Lucifer is beaten. I intend to write more stories bridging this gap, but for now, just a soft established pairing story setting down the footprints Sam and Castiel will walk in someday, when all the wars are over.

Dedicated to ohjustdisarmalready and songsaboutsleep, for hanging in there, and all the members of the Other Guardian Fan Club on Tumblr.

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**Post Script  
**

He finds Sam exactly where he expects to find him, sprawled out on the couch in Bobby's library with a book in his hands. Castiel has grown used to finding Sam this way: flopped down on his back, the arch of his body soft against the worn brown leather cushions, one leg bent and the other propped up over the armrest so that his toes dangle in the air, and squirm ever so slightly in his mismatched socks. Castiel wishes to kiss his feet when he does this. Sam holds the book open over his head, bracing the pages with his thumb and smallest finger; his other hand is pressed to his forehead, pushing his bangs back, and Castiel knows he has forgotten it there, his fingers absent now between the dark strands of his hair. The oversight makes him smile. He considers the softness of that hair, considers crossing to the couch and replacing Sam's hand with his own, carving gentle furrows through it with his fingertips. But he has come here for another reason. He pauses in the doorway and studies Sam for a long moment, the rise and fall of the breath under his light blue shirt, his barely parted lips moving in whispers as he reads each word. Then he steps through and lets the sound of his footfalls draw Sam's eyes to his, and watches a slow smile spread across his face.

The fondness that he has for these infinitely small things, that is love. That is what Sam has taught him.

Sam lowers the book to his chest, shifts his head against the armrest. "Hey, Cas," he says, in the way he always does, the way that is only Sam's. Castiel has heard his name spoken by God, by angels, by choirs of men seeking benediction; he knows now that Sam is the only one who has ever said it as it is meant to be said.

"Sam," he says in return, and watches Sam's smile grow just a little wider, the laugh lines crinkling around his eyes, the way they always do. Then he stops at the edge of the couch and asks the question he came to ask.

Sam's eyebrows draw together.

"Dancing?" he repeats, as if Castiel has said the word wrong. The angel nods all the same. Sam drops one arm to the floor, sets the book down, and then slowly lifts himself up to sit on the edge of the couch, his left hand braced against the back as if he's unsure of his balance. "What, um…what kind of dancing do you want to know about?"

Castiel feels himself frown, not certain where the distinctions should be. "The kind with two people," he tries.

Sam is smiling again, but the expression is strained, more of a grimace. One hand rises to rub the back of his neck. "This doesn't have anything to do with the movie Dean was watching yesterday, does it?" he asks gingerly, and Castiel tips his head, recalling and then dismissing the memory of a half-dressed woman and a pole and a riot of flesh.

"No," he says simply. Sam's shoulders slump in relief.

"Right. I mean, of course not. Only Dean would think stripping qualified as…" He stops himself, takes a deep breath, and looks up at Castiel once more, his hands fluttering uncertainly in his lap. "Dancing. Okay. Well, it's a social function, like at weddings and stuff, and…it's kind of something that couples do."

"Why?" Castiel asks, and Sam laughs, just a little, a breath of sound that teases out a smile at the corners of his lips.

"Just…to be close to each other, Cas. It's sort of hard to explain, I guess." Then Sam bites his bottom lip, and looks up at Castiel in a different way, like he's searching for confirmation of something in the angel's face. Castiel hopes he finds it. He wants to be what Sam is searching for, always. Sam brushes a stray lock of hair back behind his ear and fiddles with the end. "I could…show you a little. If you wanted."

He did not come here with the intention of dancing. He wants to be the one to push Sam's hair back behind his ear, to cradle the slope of his cheek and feel Sam lean into his touch as his eyes flicker closed. He tries to read Sam's expression and gets _vulnerable_, _accommodating_. "Do you enjoy dancing, Sam?" he asks.

A little shrug rolls through Sam's shoulders. "Honestly…I've never really had much chance to find out." And Castiel understands the statement for what it is, even if Sam doesn't: an invitation to change that. He wants to change everything for Sam.

He holds out one hand. "Yes," he says.

Sam laughs under his breath and Castiel wonders if it's not enough, if this is not how humans ask each other to dance—but it doesn't matter, because Sam is scooting forward, tangling their fingers together, letting himself be pulled to his feet, toe to toe with the angel. "Okay," Sam says, squeezing their joined hands. "Just let me grab some music."

In the living room, Sam toes a stack of boxes up against the wall to clear the center, shuffles the clutter of books on the table to make room for his laptop. As he moves, he keeps glancing back at Castiel, and the angel can't quite place the look on his face—somewhere between eager and disbelieving, his lips quirked around the edge of a laugh, as if he expects Castiel to disappear in the moment his back is turned. The table is mostly clear, or clear enough, when he stops with one hand snarled in his power cord and the other wrapped around the top rail of an old wooden chair, his hazel eyes drifting back to lock with Castiel's.

"D'you really want to dance with me, Cas?" he asks.

Castiel does not think he knew for certain, before this moment. He is very certain now.

"I do," he says, and Sam smiles, ducks his head, shakes off something the angel does not understand.

"Yeah. Me too," Sam whispers, the words getting lost in the hum of his laptop fan. Castiel hears them nonetheless.

They meet in the middle of the wooden floor. Sam shows him a simple two-step, one forward and the next one back. Castiel watches their feet—his bare, Sam's vibrant in his mismatched socks, the right solid blue and the other striped with white—and tries to make his body move as Sam's does, smooth and effortless, as though every cell in his body understands this rhythm, the soft shuffle of rocking back and forth. He moves with Sam and wonders about the strange exactitudes of the human race, why Sam entwines two of their hands but when Castiel does the same with the other two it makes Sam laugh, something beautiful and surprised shining in Sam's eyes as he resettles Castiel's right hand on his shoulder, mirrors him with his left. Castiel's elbow is stiff and uncooperative and he struggles to make his feet move correctly, cannot seem to hear the beat of the music the way Sam can, but he enjoys the union of their hands; he likes the warmth of it, the concreteness. In all his years as a soldier of God, he had never known anything so deeply tangible. He had not known what he was missing.

Castiel does all he can to dance with Sam. But somehow he cannot get this right, no matter how closely he tracks their feet or how many times Sam changes the song, trying a faster meter, a slower one, a song with hardly any beat at all. Castiel is only a breath from Sam, can feel his pulse through their intertwined fingers, but still they are out of step, the confluence of their bodies stilted. Each time Sam steps backward out of his hold to adjust the music, Castiel can feel him hesitate a little longer to step back in, drawing closer and closer to just giving up.

Castiel does not want that. He does not understand dancing, but he has the sense that this is a profoundly important thing, a very human thing that he needs to make work with Sam, if he is ever going to make anything work. He squeezes Sam's hand to hold him and tries harder, focuses centuries of patience and contemplation on two miniscule steps, these two tiny stitches of breath and music binding them together.

A few more minutes pass before Sam steps away, flips his computer closed.

"Yeah. Um, maybe…"

Castiel knows this is the end. All the same he holds his ground for a long moment while Sam does not move, only stands at the edge of the table with one hand pressed to the smooth wood and looks back at him with a thoughtful expression on his face. Castiel searches for surrender in his eyes. Then unexpectedly Sam smiles, just a little, and steps away from the table, back toward the angel moored in the middle of the room.

"Let's try something else."

It takes nearly ten minutes for Sam to find what he is looking for in the clutter of Bobby's storeroom. Castiel does not recognize the object he finally lifts from the bottom shelf in the farthest corner—a long gray box with a stiff handle and two black mesh speakers set into its face. He recognizes the small basket of cassette tapes beside it from excursions in Dean's car.

"I can't believe Bobby actually held onto this old boom box," Sam murmurs, his breath stirring the dust, and in his surprised smile Castiel understands the fondness for permanence born out of a life where it is never expected, the wonder of memory and reality still aligned. Sam kneels on the concrete and thumbs through the cassettes one at a time and then finally lingers on the second-to-last one, glances up at the angel hovering at his shoulder. Castiel isn't sure what Sam sees, but it makes him smile. "Yeah. This'll do," he says, and reaches out a hand, lets Castiel pull him up from his knees.

Castiel does not recognize the song at first. He is distracted by the crackle of static, the initial creak of the cassette player's gears, the feeling of weightlessness in his chest as Sam finds him in the center of the floor again, slides his fingers into the gaps between Castiel's one at a time and brushes the angel's knuckles with his dry fingertips, every centimeter of skin between them a slow burn. He knows nothing but Sam, returning to his arms, settling a hand on the shoulder of his simple white shirt, guiding him back a step, until the words come in.

_Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?_

And then Castiel knows what song this is, and looks up at Sam, and Sam looks down at their feet and bites his lip to restrain his smile.

The movements are easier this time. The song is slower, but Castiel does not think that is the reason. Perhaps it is because the music reminds him of a park bench under the falling snow, every flake ephemeral with shifting light, and Sam's hand warm in his pocket; reminds him of the first time he ever felt these fingers threaded through his wings. He wonders if Sam is thinking of these things, too. His body is soft against Castiel's, much softer than before, and every time the angel catches his eyes he smiles, and inches just a little closer. Castiel does not quite understand how there can still be so much space between them.

Even in the silence of an empty house the song is quiet, the crackle of old tape breaking through the melody once in a while, and it keeps them quiet, too, their feet barely whispering over the wooden floor. Their steps are getting smaller, slower, and as they drift back and forth Castiel can feel it at last, the rhythm between them. His hand slips down from Sam's shoulder to settle at his waist, and he can feel the heat of him through his shirt. Sam's arm has relaxed, too, draped loosely around his neck, and he is humming along with the music, so softly that Castiel can barely hear it, though he feels every warm breath against his cheek. It makes Castiel want to pull him closer, close enough that he can feel the thrum of that low, hesitant sound in his bones. His limbs are still strange to him, in some ways, and he is not always certain how to move them naturally—but Sam squeezes his left hand when he slides the right around to the dip in the young man's lower back, so Castiel keeps it there, and wonders at the tiny shivers trembling down Sam's spine when his body is so very warm.

Castiel knows he should be watching his feet, but every time he glances up his eyes catch on Sam's smile. Sam ducks his head and his smile gets a little wider, and that only makes it harder to look away. Castiel wants to press his lips to Sam's, to feel them part beneath his as they always do. He doesn't know how to do it without breaking his hold.

This is wholeness, Castiel decides, tracing the creases between Sam's fingers with his own. This is infinite grace. He has known God's love and love as abstraction and love as consecration, and he has carried these things within him for a thousand years. But until Sam, he had never known this: love as it was intended to be, the rhythm between two disparate beings that makes them one. Before this, all other love is as nothing.

_Just hear those sleigh bells jingling…_

He is caught off guard by the song changing. The tempo of the next track is faster, and Castiel tries to move his feet to match it, but it's difficult because Sam has not adjusted and now they are out of step again, their shoulders bumping as he surges forward and back. The discord between them makes Sam laugh. Castiel glances up at him with a furrowed brow.

"Is it wrong, Sam?" he asks.

Sam shakes his head, though he is still laughing. "No," he promises. Then he leans down and presses his forehead to Castiel's shoulder, tucks his face into the angel's neck. "You're perfect, Cas," Sam whispers into his skin.

Castiel does not know what perfect means. He doubts it has much to do with him. But whatever perfect is in Sam's mind, that is what he wishes to be. He will forsake all else.

Castiel gives up on following the beat. He and Sam slip into a pattern again, slower than before. They are out of step with the music but back in step with each other, their footfalls soft, sussurant against the wooden floor. Castiel leans his temple against Sam's dark hair and closes his eyes and relishes this, the closeness and simplicity, the warmth of Sam breathing against his skin. Then Sam lifts his head and presses their foreheads together, and as Castiel looks into his eyes he remembers everything he found beautiful in the eons before Sam, and dismisses it all.

"Thanks for the dance, Cas," Sam whispers into the half-breath of space between them. Castiel frowns.

"Has it ended?" he asks, though his feet are still moving. Sam smiles and shakes his head, and the motion brushes the tips of their noses together.

"There's a little bit of the song left."

Castiel squeezes the knot of their fingers and prays it is more than a little.

.x.

Bobby thought he'd mentally prepared himself to walk in on anything when those boys became semi-permanent residents in his house and Sam stopped sleeping alone in the room at the end of the hall. He didn't prepare himself for this.

The house seems to be silent when Bobby first pulls open the back door, his arms full of grocery bags and the mail clenched under one elbow. He isn't trying to be quiet, doesn't know he has any reason to be; he kicks his shoes off and one bangs into the mudroom wall, and he walks heavy into the kitchen, the bags rustling as he dumps them on the counter. He can hear a distant melody, the suggestion of music, but it's too soft to pick out the details, and he doesn't pay it any mind as he flips through the mail, plucks out a letter from another hunter, heads toward the door out of the kitchen to go throw it on his desk in the den. It isn't until he hits the threshold of the living room that he even realizes they're there. Then he jerks back before he can be seen, disappears into the kitchen as fast as he came out and leans back against the refrigerator with the strains of holiday music lingering in his ears.

Bobby prepared himself for almost anything. But somehow he isn't prepared for this, the image that hangs in front of his eyes as he stares at the newspaper gutted on the kitchen table: Sam dancing with an angel in his living room to an old cassette of Christmas carols playing on the stereo he bought off Rufus for ten bucks maybe twenty years ago, his adopted son and a celestial being shuffling back and forth with their hands laced and their heads close together. It's too intimate somehow, more so than any of the things he'd steeled himself to walk in on. It feels like an intensely private moment, and Bobby doesn't want to intrude any more than he already has—but he's not sure where that leaves him, stranded in the kitchen, wary of going back outside in case they hear the door. He stops and starts across the linoleum twice and then puts the groceries away one item at a time, very slowly, so the bags don't crinkle too much.

Bobby doesn't want to get in the middle of whatever they're doing—or sideways of it, or backward, or any other direction. But somehow he can't stop himself from glancing over his shoulder once or twice at the doorway into the living room, as he peels the plastic bags carefully away from each can of diced tomatoes and black beans. He can't see them from his angle, but it doesn't matter, because their image is still banging around in his head, fortified by the distant music and the muted flares of soft laughter he can somehow hear all the way from the other room.

It's the way Sam looks that strikes Bobby the most. He never expected to find Sam dancing in the first place, but on the off chance that he had Bobby thinks he would have expected nervousness, stiff knees, some uncertainty in that boy who still seems all of twelve years old to him sometimes, when his gangly limbs aren't getting along with his brain. But that isn't how Sam looks. He looks confident, carried away. He's in love, and Bobby knows that look well enough. It's a good look on Sam, he decides. A hell of a lot better than some he's seen.

He waits it out in the kitchen until the unmistakable sound of Jingle Bell Rock is broken by a scratchy recording of Dean's young voice screeching out _jingle bells, Batman smells_, a prank the older Dean would probably still find funny. Bobby waits a second or two to give them time to break apart before he steps into the living room. Sam is fiddling with the boom box, trying to find the stop button, and Castiel looks waylaid and half lost in the center of the floor, one foot cocked as if ready to step back into the dance. Sam turns to Bobby and pushes his bangs out of his face, giddy and embarrassed and sporting a little red in his cheeks as he laughs and gives a grimace instead of a smile.

"Hey, Bobby. Sorry. I forgot Dean mutilated this tape a million years ago…did you just get back from the store?"

Bobby wonders if either of them realizes their hands are still entwined.


End file.
